


Cut-and-Cover

by pendrecarc



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, autopsy!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-09
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robert Wilcox is sixty-eight years old and three months dead, and it wasn't a drunk lorry driver that killed him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cut-and-Cover

Robert Wilcox is sixty-eight years old and three months dead, and it wasn’t a drunk lorry driver that killed him.

Sherlock Holmes is half his age and, for the moment at least, still very much alive. He hovers at her shoulder, three-quarters of his considerable attention on the body under her hands and the remainder tossed into the corner where John Watson sits ready to pounce and drool all over it. She knows how that works, how Sherlock doles out his condescension and favour and what might actually be humanity (though she wouldn’t swear to it) in amounts calibrated for his desired result. With John Watson he does it for praise and companionship; with Molly Hooper he does it for organs and access. Which she’s already given him today, so he doesn’t spare any thought for her now. His eyes follow the knife as it parts flesh from bone without ever considering the hands that wield it.

She’ll never let him do this himself, though he’s asked and though she’s no doubt he’d be clean and quick and exquisitely competent. She nearly lets herself shiver, imagining it, but that would spoil the firm line she’s just made in Mr. Wilcox’s abdomen.

Sometimes she looks at people and imagines where she’d place the first incision if their bodies were cold and stiff on her slab, all the blood and breath and bother of life drawn right out of them. With John Watson she’d start high on the left shoulder. She’s seen photographs. In the ones from his surgeries it was raw and angry, but in the more recent ones taken with a telescopic lens between the gap in his bedroom curtains it's a pale and gnarled mass, and she knows how his scar tissue would catch just so on the blade of a scalpel. She knows what he’d look like inside, too. They’re all the same once you get down past the life to the body buried underneath. She likes knowing this, likes being able to walk through her day and see the people brushing past her and know just what they are. There’s power in that.

She peels the skin back from fat and long-dead muscle to pin it out of the way. John Watson leans in for a better look, as unfazed by the sight as Sherlock, though not, she thinks, for quite the same reasons. They’ll both look a little harder, and between the sixth and seventh ribs they’ll find evidence of a thin blade pushed up through the cartilage and into the right lung. The entry wound is obscured by trauma (sustained post-mortem, whatever the police reports may say), and it’ll take them some time to find it. She could show them now, of course, but that's not her place. Sherlock will work it out soon enough.

When he does, she’ll fold Robert Wilcox back up in his layers of flesh and bone and skin. She’ll sew him up with an even stitch and send him off to be put back underground, where he belongs now. She knows that will make Jim happy. He’s so _disturbed_ by the idea of exhumation, silly man. It twists that lovely twisted mind of his a little farther ‘round the bend to see his work reversed, even for just a few days. Molly doesn’t mind it at all, not when it means an hour breathing in the same cold, dead air as Sherlock Holmes and dreaming of all the things she’ll do to him once he’s not breathing any more.

With Sherlock Holmes she’ll start with a long line down the sternum, right over what he’d like to think is an empty cavity. He’s wrong, though. She knows what he’ll look like underneath, and she finds it terribly delicious that in essentials he’s no different from everyone else. Jim-Who-Is-Sometimes-Called-Moriarty plans to burn his heart out. Molly-Whose-Name-Is-Not-Hooper plans to let him, just so long as there’s enough left over for her to carve it out of his chest when they’re done playing their little games. She knows they’ll take their time about it, but Molly doesn’t mind that either. She can wait.


End file.
